Constructing Everyday Well-Being: Insights from God-Saeng for Personal Informatics

TL;DR

This study explores how South Korean cultural practices like God-Saeng influence everyday well-being and how personal informatics systems can be designed to support meaningful engagement beyond mere data tracking.

Contribution

It provides empirical insights into the sociocultural dynamics of well-being practices and suggests design opportunities for culturally aware personal informatics systems.

Findings

Participants used planning and datafication to stabilize themselves.

Routine practices intensified self-monitoring pressures.

Participants reinterpreted activities through cultural contexts.

Abstract

While Personal Informatics (PI) systems support behavior change, everyday well-being involves more than achieving individual target behaviors. It is shaped by cultural narratives that give actions meaning. In South Korea, the God-Saeng phenomenon, encompassing disciplined, collective, and publicly documented self-improvement practices, offers a lens into how well-being is negotiated in daily life. We conducted a 10-day probe (N=24) with bite-sized missions to examine how young adults engaged in God-Saeng. Participants relied on planning practices, accountability infrastructures, and datafication to stabilize themselves, yet these same routines also intensified pressures toward self-monitoring and performance. They navigated tensions between consistency and flexibility, authenticity and visibility, and productivity and broader values such as relationships, and reinterpreted ordinary activities through sociocultural contexts. These insights suggest design opportunities for PI systems that move beyond tracking, toward digital instruments that help users negotiate tensions, make meaning, and reflexively understand how technologies participate in their culturally and existentially situated well-being.